Mr. President, Your Toga Is Showing

By Christopher Buckley

Jan. 12, 2018

Image

CreditCreditDoug John Miller

President Trump’s assertion of his “genius,” athwart recent reporting that his inner circle describes him in somewhat different terms — “moron,” “idiot,” “like a child” — along with concerns about his mental health, awakened a dormant memory of a scene in the 1970s TV adaptation of Robert Graves’s classic novel of ancient Rome, “I, Claudius.”

The Emperor Caligula, played to deranged and very scary perfection by John Hurt, tells his uncle Claudius: “I’m simply undergoing a change. It’s the most momentous transformation that any human being has ever achieved.”

Uncle Claudius’s frozen face is right out of Dorothy Parker’s “What fresh hell can this be?” He knows that this “change” portends no joy in Caesarville. But his life at the palace has made him nothing if not an artful survivor. Feigning delighted shock and awe, he tells his nephew: “I was blind not to see it instantly. You’re no longer human! May I be the first to worship you, as a g-g-g-god?”

Caligula replies with a weary air of menacing ennui, “It took you a long time to perceive that I’m no longer human.”

So begins the era of Caligula the God, and what fun it will be.

Mr. Trump’s declaration of his genius was of a piece with the sycophants rodeo in the White House cabinet room last June, when his consuls and lictors took turns lavishing praise on him in terms to make even Caesar blush.

Blowing into the pitch pipe, Reince Priebus, then the chief of staff, set the key: “On behalf of the entire senior staff around you, Mr. President, we thank you for the opportunity and the blessing that you’ve given us to serve your agenda and the American people.” Vice President Mike Pence led the cheerleading with such interjections as, “You’ve restored American credibility on the world stage” and “You’ve spurred an optimism in this country that’s setting records.” All hail!

As the saying goes, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does often rhyme. Curious, I pulled my Penguin Classics paperback of Suetonius’ “The Twelve Caesars” off the shelf and turned to the Caligula chapter. Let’s go to the text:

He invented besides a new kind of spectacle, such as had never been heard of before. For he made a bridge, of about three miles and a half in length, from Baiae to the mole of Puteoli.

Historians are uncertain whether this floating bridge to nowhere, for the sole purpose of Caligula joy-riding across it in pointless triumph, was ever actually built. They do however agree that it is evidence the emperor wasn’t playing with a full set of marbles. Some might discern a similarity between it and the $18 billion Mexican border wall we may be building, at a time of declining illegal border crossings.

In his temple stood a statue of gold, the exact image of himself, which was daily dressed in garments corresponding with those he wore himself.

Being very desirous to have a senator torn to pieces, he employed some persons to call him a public enemy, fall upon him as he entered the senate-house, stab him with their styles, and deliver him to the rest to tear asunder. Nor was he satisfied until he saw the limbs and bowels of the man, after they had been dragged through the streets, piled up in a heap before him.

He aggravated his barbarous actions by language equally outrageous. “There is nothing in my nature that I commend or approve so much,” said he, as his “inflexible rigor.” Upon his grandmother Antonia’s giving him some advice, he said to her, “Remember that all things are lawful for me.”

He often talked of the lawyers as if he intended to abolish their profession. “By Hercules!” he would say, “I shall put it out of their power to answer any questions in law, otherwise than by referring to me!”

Donald Trump “is openly calling for the Department of Justice, which he controls, to put his political opponents in jail.” (The New Yorker, Jan. 2, 2018).

“‘Very Frustrated’ Trump Becomes Top Critic of Law Enforcement” (The New York Times, Nov. 4, 2017).

He was tall, of a pale complexion, ill-shaped, his neck and legs very slender, his eyes and temples hollow, his brows broad and knit, his hair thin, and the crown of the head bald. The other parts of his body were much covered with hair. His countenance, which was naturally hideous and frightful, he purposely rendered more so, forming it before a mirror into the most horrible contortions.

“President Trump Staffers Claim He Scowls and Squints in Photos Because He Thinks It Makes Him Look Tough ‘Like Winston Churchill’” (DailyMail.com, March 22, 2017).

What most of all disordered him was want of sleep, for he seldom had more than three or four hours rest in a night …

… and even then his sleep was not sound, but disturbed by strange dreams, fancying, among other things, that a form representing the ocean spoke to him. Being, therefore, often weary with lying awake so long, sometimes he sat up in his bed, at others, walked in the longest porticos about the house, and from time to time invoked and looked out for the approach of day.

To this crazy constitution of his mind may, I think, very justly be ascribed two faults which he had of a nature directly repugnant one to the other, namely, an excessive confidence and the most abject timidity.

“Donald Trump’s Draft Deferments: Four for College, One for Bad Feet” (The New York Times, Aug. 1, 2016).

So there it is, or as Suetonius might say, Res ipsa loquitur. Whatever the similarities, Mr. Trump certainly differs from “Little Boots” in one respect: Unlike the emperor, he hasn’t undergone a “momentous transformation.” The record indicates that he has always known he’s divine.

As to how — on earth — we arrived at this point, here, perhaps, a note of consolation, in an earlier scene in “I, Claudius.” Caligula’s great-uncle Tiberius, another beauty of a Caesar, informs him: “I will make you my successor, Gaius Caligula. Rome deserves you.”

“Is that a joke?” Caligula replies.

“Not yet, but it will be.”

Christopher Buckley is the author of the forthcoming novel “The Judge Hunter.”